Just before this happened and the trial was set to open the following Monday morning, Sean O’Brien made another plea for a delay:
“We shouldn’t be trying this case with this panel in this county at this time. Frankly, Your Honor, we’re not ready to go.”
The judge disagreed. He too had come this far with this cast of characters and legal issues, and he was committed to forging ahead.
Throughout the jury selection, Robinson had sat quietly beside his lawyers, looking something like a ghost. He was extremely pale, wore a hearing aid, and had lost weight and more of his hair. He looked much older than he had two years earlier. From his blustery persona he had been reduced to a subdued, shrunken figure who looked remarkably small and harmless in his tie and dark business suit. He never made eye contact with anyone except certain female witnesses and members of his family. His skin seemed to get paler as the trial wore on. Like everyone else in the courtroom he may have been cold. Judge Anderson had set the thermostat low to keep everybody awake and alert. He knew it would be a long haul.
If security had been tight for the preliminary hearing, it was tighter now. One could not read a newspaper in the hall leading to the courtroom for fear that a headlined story about the case might prejudice someone involved in the trial. Two armed guards stood outside the courtroom and would not allow anyone inside unless there was a break. Three more armed guards were inside at all times watching Robinson and monitoring other activities in the courtroom. The lawyers were under such a strict gag order that they could not even talk about their educational backgrounds with reporters. The judge, who had a flat, forceful voice and manner, was absolutely determined to keep shenanigans out of the trial. He almost succeeded.
On Monday, October 7, Paul Morrison presented his opening remarks in a surprisingly understated fashion. He did not go in for histrionics, and even this case would not push him in that direction. He spoke for only a few minutes, soberly laying out the charges against Robinson and quietly contending that Robinson had killed women for fifteen years. He lured them and murdered them, for money or bloodlust. All seven charges in this case were part of a long-standing common scheme or course of conduct that should result in a capital murder conviction.
In his presentation, Sean O’Brien went into far more detail, describing how his client was a serial philanderer who’d been unfaithful to his wife for decades. The attorney acknowledged that these things had hurt the Robinson family and that Nancy surveilled her husband while he was having an affair. O’Brien had a soft voice and gentle demeanor. He wore a graying beard and a thoughtful expression. He seemed interested in ideas and in searching for the intellectual or psychological truth behind John Robinson, which is an unusual thing in an attorney. Like Berrigan, O’Brien was also an excellent choice to defend the accused.
He tried to counter Morrison’s argument by suggesting not so much that his client was innocent as that the various charges were significantly different. They were not part of a common scheme or course of conduct, and should therefore not lead to a capital conviction. O’Brien’s opening remarks set the tone for the entire defense. They raised the possibility that others might have been involved in some of the crimes (how could one middle-aged man who was not in good shape have moved those barrels by himself?). O’Brien brought up a fingerprint found on a roll of duct tape in Robinson’s farm trailer—it did not belong to the defendant—and mentioned other DNA that could not be connected to him. From the beginning, O’Brien seemed to be walking a delicate legal tightrope: he didn’t appear to be asking the jury for an acquittal as much as he was preparing them not to take Robinson’s life.
The lawyer went into considerable detail about the BDSM lifestyle and spoke of the importance of fantasy in this subculture. He clearly did not want to tarnish the memory of any of the victims but raised the possibility that those delving into sexual games on or off the Internet were potentially courting danger. Both women and men were responsible for their actions in this realm. He pointed out that Izabela Lewicka had moved to Kansas City of her own free will to learn to be a dominatrix, and Suzette Trouten had surfed Gorean chat rooms looking for partners. Hadn’t Suzette come to Olathe after placing an ad on the Internet looking for a BDSM master and Robinson had answered it? Hadn’t Vickie Neufeld also consented to her relationship with the defendant? O’Brien went further, suggesting that social scientists believe that people who enjoy BDSM were sexually abused as children and associate love and affection with pain and bondage.
But the lawyer kept returning to Robinson’s wife, as he would throughout the trial. Just as she’d stood beside her husband during all of his troubles and taken loyalty to new levels, she would now be his main line of defense.
“Nancy Robinson,” O’Brien said, “has remained faithful to John and she will say that his main fault is his affairs. She will say that they had a normal and frequent sex life. She calls him a dreamer and he’d get euphoric about a new business opportunity. He’d carry these ideas too far and too fast. Nancy will criticize his philandering. She’d follow him around and gather evidence…. She found videos and hotel receipts at storage lockers and would kick him out of the house and would demand the affairs end. The kids would beg her to bring him back. She now says that John loves her and she loves him and he loves his children. He never missed a volleyball or soccer match and was very actively involved in his children’s lives.”
The first witness was Carol Trouten, who created the same impression as Nancy Robinson had at the preliminary hearing but for a different reason. She looked and sounded numb, especially when talking about her deceased daughter. Resignation permeated her voice and eyes. She’d been married to the same man three different times, had raised five children, and appeared to be someone who’d seen a great deal of life, yet nothing had prepared her for what she was doing now. Unlike Nancy, she wasn’t trying to save someone’s life but to understand the death of her youngest girl. She also did not seem to be the sort of person who would take much comfort in helping the state of Kansas execute the defendant.
Carol was soon followed by Lore Remington, who was anything but numb. She was obviously angry and for at least several reasons. One was that because of the drawn-out jury selection, she’d had to stay in Kansas City for a number of days waiting for the trial to begin. Second, until one day earlier, she’d not been aware that the police had taped a phone conversation she’d had with Robinson on May 25, 2000. When the prosecutors now played the tape in the courtroom, as she sat on the witness stand and lowered her head, Robinson went into detail about Lore placing electrodes on her rectum for sexual stimulation as part of her training as a submissive. He gave her other orders, and as she listened to them, she visibly stiffened with embarrassment.
She’d clearly not expected these details to be revealed in open court, in front of a roomful of strangers and reporters. She acted genuinely hurt at having her secrets exposed to the world. Like many others in the BDSM realm, she’d enjoyed a fantasy life in cyberspace, an escape from her daily existence as a wife and mother. Robinson had shattered the fantasy for her just as he had for Nancy and his children. He was no more faithful to the BDSM rules than he was to the rules of conventional marriage. Until now, for people like Lore, that realm of S&M had retained its own kind of honor or innocence, but Robinson had violated the customs and taken away the innocence of sexual role-playing; you could see the effects of this on Lore’s face. She was enraged at having to be on the stand.
The only thing that made her mood worse was that she did not finish testifying the first day of the trial and was supposed to stay over another night in Kansas City. To the young woman from Nova Scotia, this was intolerable. At the end of court that Monday afternoon, the judge asked her if she would be returning to the stand the following day. She defiantly said no—she was going back to Canada. The judge ordered the armed guards near Robinson to arrest Lore, and he set her bail at $25,000. The guards rushed the Canadian, grabbed her, and hustled her away. She sp
ent the night across the street in the same jail that had been housing Robinson since June 2000. An evening behind bars did not improve her attitude. She seemed just as angry the next morning when she showed up in court and even more anxious to go home. After going back to Canada, she sent the Johnson County legal system an e-mail saying she hated them all.
One final thing had upset Lore on the stand. During her testimony, the prosecution had tried to introduce some e-mails that she’d sent to Suzette on the last known day of Suzette’s life. This evidence set off a hugely complex, dragged-out debate between the prosecutors and the defense over what is an original e-mail document and what is a second or third-generation duplicate. Can apparent originals be tampered with on-line by cutting or pasting in new information? Had that happened in this case? Should e-mails be treated as real evidence in a murder trial or as virtual evidence that can’t be relied upon?
The debate had been triggered because of a time discrepancy in one e-mail between when it had been sent and when it had been received, and this led the trial into a legal quagmire almost before it could get started. Throughout the first and second day of testimony, the lawyers constantly stopped the process to run up to the bench to argue these issues. They hotly discussed all this while standing just a few feet away from the jury. The judge was so concerned that jurors would hear the discussions and be influenced by them that he ordered a boom box brought into the courtroom to play music during the bench conferences. When nobody could decide what music to listen to, Judge Anderson told the jurors just to tune in some static to drown out the talk. They did and court was filled with a low, annoying buzz.
At the end of two days of sparring over e-mail, the judge had become exasperated with how the Internet was affecting the trial.
“This is a new area of the law,” he said. “The law lags behind technology quite a ways…. Technology creates evidentiary problems faster than the law can come up with evidentiary solutions…. Some of these issues are being treated in more novel fashion than they deserve.”
He was tired of the arguing over what was a first-generation e-mail and what is not. Perhaps because of this, the prosecution did not do much more in this area. Following Robinson’s arrest, the ninety-one thousand computer files that Mike Jacobson had so painstakingly sorted through and reduced to one thousand relevant files for the case saw almost no play in the courtroom.
Nearly every day a different group of high school students showed up to listen to testimony. They’d been sent there by their teachers to learn more about how the American government, and the legal system in particular, functioned during a criminal trial, but they were probably absorbing more about sexual behavior. From the dominant submissive advice that Robinson had given Lore Remington on the phone to the accounts of witnesses meeting others for S&M games in Gorean chat rooms, the trial’s underlying theme was how the Internet had connected people all over the nation and the world who were looking for ways to hook up with a new sex partner. The Net had opened up a fantasy world to millions.
Fittingly, the first trial of someone accused of being a cyber serial killer was taking place in a modest Midwestern setting and was filled with the testimony of modest-looking people. One could not have guessed the erotic lives of these witnesses by glancing at them or known how deep the need for escape ran inside them. Individuals were never quite what they seemed to be; they were often much more than one imagined. High school students don’t often picture the prospect of grandmothers (like Jean Glines) having phone sex with alleged murderers (like John Robinson). The trial was, in some ways, about sex among unglamorous people and how the Internet had unleashed so many pent-up possibilities. The case evoked all the questions and mysteries about human desire and the human longing for connection.
On the trial’s third day, a local radio personality named Randy Miller sent one of his minions out to the courthouse to give away T-shirts. They were emblazoned with the words “John E. Robinson Trial 2002 Roll Out The Barrels.” In smaller letters, the shirts read, “Of Evidence.” The incident outraged the defense team, which asked for a change of venue. Judge Anderson denied their request, but was agitated over the matter. From the bench, this gray-haired, stern-looking man, who projected complete humorlessness, acknowledged that if he said what he really felt about the T-shirts, that would “not be a good thing.”
XLIII
The state called 110 witnesses, including Izabela Lewicka’s parents, Don Robinson, Kathy Klinginsmith, Barbara Sandre, Alecia Cox, and Vickie Neufeld. After testifying, Don Robinson surprised everyone by walking over to the defense table and shaking his older brother’s hand. Kathy Klinginsmith had no doubt been coached by the prosecution since her outspoken appearance at the preliminary hearing. On this occasion, she did not say that Robinson looked evil (the kind of characterization that can cause a mistrial). While Kathy testified, members of Carl Stasi’s family looked on from the gallery, including a teenage cousin of Tiffany/Heather. The cousin bore a haunting resemblance to both Lisa and her daughter, who had by now grown up and become a teenager herself. Some people in court could not take their eyes off the cousin; it was as if one of the dead women had shown up at the trial of her murderer.
On the stand, Barbara Sandre looked mortified at having been dragged into this mess, Alecia Cox retained the confident swagger she’d previously displayed in court, and Vickie Neufeld seemed quite shaky. She was not pleased when defense attorney Jason Billam brought up that after she’d returned to Texas following her violent engagements with Robinson in April 2000, she’d sent him a positive-sounding e-mail about their time together. The complexities of adult sexuality had surfaced again. Quoting from her e-mail, Billam read, “These fantasies were pure joy and more fun than anything I’ve ever encountered.”
After listening to her testify, the judge told the prosecution that he wanted to throw out the sexual battery charge that Neufeld had brought against Robinson. She was not concerned for her physical safety when visiting the defendant in Kansas City, the judge suggested, but worried that if she didn’t go along with his sex games, he would not help her find a job. After some minor resistance from the DA, Judge Anderson dropped the charge. This meant that both of the original sex assault counts—brought by Jeanna Milliron and Neufeld—had now been tossed aside. Without saying as much, the judge had made it clear that if adults came together to participate in BDSM relationships, they needed strong evidence to accuse their sex partner of committing a crime.
The most intriguing prosecution witness was Nancy Robinson, who arrived in court well dressed and freshly coiffed. She wore a handsome cream-colored suit with a blue blouse, her blond hair sweeping around her cheek in a youthful curve. Despite her best efforts to make a good appearance, her mouth looked defeated and she walked with a slump. On the stand, she appeared to be working hard to maintain control of herself and not to show anger toward Paul Morrison. The DA remained cool. Morrison was relentlessly folksy, dropping his g’s from words like talking or laughing, but underneath his friendly manner lay a forceful prosecutor. When someone under oath did something unexpected and made him livid, as Nancy Robinson would while testifying, his down-home demeanor would suddenly vanish.
From time to time, Robinson’s youngest daughter, Christy, showed up in the courtroom as a spectator. She stared at her father with a fierce protectiveness and conveyed her love for the man. She gave one a glimpse into his home life, but not nearly as much as his wife did. Nancy made the Robinson household real as no one else could have. She described the three computers that sat side by side in the office of their Olathe residence. She’d used one of them to trace the roots of her family tree, and another was for her grandchildren to play games on. The third was the machine Robinson had logged on to in the mornings after Nancy had gone to work; this computer had guided him through cyberspace in his endless quest for more and more women. It had taken him into some of the darker recesses of the Internet and led to several of his affairs in local motels. But those affairs, Nancy p
ointed out, took place in the daytime. Regardless of what he did when the sun was up, she told the jury, “My husband was always home in the evening.” (Robinson was, as Morrison once told the Kansas City Star, an “8 to 5 serial killer.”)
During the trial, I couldn’t help looking at Nancy Robinson as a victim who was verbally, emotionally, and psychologically brow-beaten. I believe that she was dominated and controlled by her husband in every aspect of her life. She became dependent on him and as the years went by her self-esteem was affected. Her goal was to keep the family together with the hope that as her husband grew older, he would lose interest in other women. Unfortunately, Robinson and people like him do not change their interests; their need to take advantage of and harm others does not lessen. They will stop only if they are caught or die.
Under cross-examination by O’Brien, Nancy lightly ventured into Robinson’s family background, as if she were laying the groundwork for more psychological testimony to come. What she now told the court caused her to pause and start crying.
“His relationship with his mother was not very good,” she said.
“His mother was very cold. There really wasn’t a relationship between him and his mother.”
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